By Jeph Ajobaju, Chief Copy Editor
Rage over historical abuses is galvanising Americans, black and white, now on their feet for seven straight days protesting the cruel murder of George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer in Minneapolis.
There is racism in Europe, especially in countries with sizeable minority populations, such as the United Kingdom and France, and to a lesser extent in Italy, The Netherlands, and Germany.
But racism is more systemic, overt, and aggressive in the US than anywhere else.
The entrenched class system in the UK lumps working class whites with blacks and Asians; they all attend the same government schools and live in the same council housing.
Because all racial groups mingle in the lower rungs of the social ladder in the UK, there are 10 times more interracial marriages in the UK than in the rest of Europe.
France also does not have a strict and structural segregation between the major and minor racial groups in school, jobs, and housing.
This is not the case in the US, where historical slavery dating back 400 years still ensures black folks attend separate schools – or made dominant in certain schools – live in separate housing blocks, and get only some types of jobs.
Skin colour and structural concentration of blacks in certain social sectors make them easy targets for racists.
The BBC looked at some of the data around crime and justice in the US, and what it shows about the experience of African-Americans when it comes to law and order.
1. African-Americans are more likely to get fatally shot
The figures that are available for incidents in which the police shoot and kill people show that for African-Americans, there’s a much higher chance of being fatally shot relative to their overall numbers in the US population.
In fact, in 2019, although African-Americans made up less than 14 per cent of the population (according to official census figures), they accounted for more than 23 per cent of the just over 1,000 fatal shootings by the police.
And that figure has been relatively consistent since 2017, whereas the number of white victims has come down since then.
2. African-Americans are arrested at a higher rate for drug abuse
African-Americans are arrested for drug abuse at a much higher rate than white Americans, although surveys show drug use at similar levels.
In 2018, around 750 out of every 100,000 African-Americans were arrested for drug abuse, compared to around 350 out of every 100,000 white Americans.
Previous national surveys on drug use show that white people use drugs at similar rates, but African-Americans continue to get arrested at a higher rate.
For example, a study by the American Civil Liberties Union found that African-Americans were 3.7 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than whites, even though their rate of marijuana usage was comparable.
3. More African-Americans are imprisoned
African-Americans are imprisoned at five times the rate of white Americans and at almost twice the rate of Hispanic-Americans, according to the latest data.
In 2018, African-Americans made up around 13 per cent of the US population, but represented almost a third of the country’s prison population.
White Americans made up around 30 per cent of the prison population – despite representing more than 60 per cent of the total US population.
That is more than 1,000 African-American prisoners for every 100,000 African-Americans, compared to around 200 white inmates for every 100,000 white Americans.
The US prison population is defined as inmates sentenced to more than a year in a federal or state prison.
Imprisonment rates have dropped for African-Americans over the last decade, but they still make up more of the prison population than any other race.
Nationality is immaterial in US racism
Barrett Holmes Pitner, a writer and journalist based in Washington, also highlights other unique features in American racism.
In an article he wrote for the BBC reproduced below, Pitner says news stories emerge almost daily in the US about police being called over black Americans doing nothing more than being black.
In May 2018 in California, three black people – a Jamaican, a Canadian of Nigerian descent, and a London native – were confronted by seven police cars as they checked out of their Airbnb because a white American thought they were robbing the house.
Though they were not American, they were still subjected to racist American stereotypes – and being confronted with tense, potentially life-threatening altercations with police without ever committing a crime.
I’ve travelled a fair amount around the world, but America’s racist status quo remains unique and alarmingly oppressive. American racism is entirely complexion-based and monolithic. One’s nationality is immaterial.
Years ago during one of my trips to France, a woman at La Poste refused to sell me stamps because she thought I was African.
When she learned that I was American, she apologised and sold me the stamps. The racism I experienced in France is totally unacceptable, but it provided an escape not afforded in May to these three visitors to America.
In France, nationality usurped race, and while that can have its own problems, it was still very different from the racism back home.
When I was in London, I lived in Bethnal Green during the 2011 riots, which started after London police officers killed Mark Duggan, a black man.
As teenage vandals looted and set my neighbourhood ablaze, I remember casually walking down the street during the chaos and having a London police officer politely ask me to return to my flat.
There was no tense exchange, I was not arrested, and I never feared for my life.
During the week of the riots, Londoners openly discussed how black people might receive different treatment from law enforcement, but conversations focused on analysing policing techniques, discussing ways to keep teenagers off of the streets during the summer when they do not have school, and catching looters via CCTV.
In the American discourse, a supposedly inherent danger or criminality of black bodies would have been used to justify the police’s killing of Duggan and present the riots as an inevitable by-product of a “culture of crime”.
The killing of Michael Brown and the riots in Ferguson followed this all-too-familiar American script.
Racism towards black people in America has largely nothing to do with immigration or nationality. There is no home country for African-Americans to connect to.
Instead it is essentially a status quo of domestic alienation, dehumanisation, criminalisation, and terror. European racism is bad, but it was still more welcoming than America’s.
21st century slave codes
America’s systemic racism starts with slavery and the various slave codes – state or federal laws created that codified the inhumane practice of chattel slavery into law.
The American South was a “slave society”, not merely a society with slaves. However, following the abolition of slavery, laws similar to the slave codes continued to oppress black people.
Following the Civil War, these “black codes” had the explicit purpose of depriving newly freed black Americans of the rights they had won.
Black codes varied from state to state, but their legal foundation centred on vagrancy laws that allowed for an African-American to be arrested if he was unemployed or homeless.
They applied to countless blacks because housing and employment opportunities for freed blacks in the South were almost non-existent after the war.
Supporters of Virginia’s Vagrancy Act of 1866, one of these measures, stated that it would reinstitute “slavery in all but its name”.
White Southerners would report blacks for vagrancy, and law enforcement would arrest them and sentence African-Americans to up three months of forced labour on public or private lands.
The federal government fought against black codes during Reconstruction by electing former abolitionists and freed blacks to public office, and creating laws and adding amendments to the US Constitution to protect the rights of black Americans.
But following the collapse of Reconstruction in 1877, Southern states brought them back. Black codes became the bedrock of state constitutions. Poll taxes and literacy exams to prevent African Americans from voting soon became the norm.
Jim Crow and racial segregation, which governed the South until the 1960s, are outgrowths of those laws.
Black life criminalised, dehumanised
As black families fled the South in the 20th Century during the Great Migration, black codes followed them to Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and elsewhere.
Black Americans – who were domestic refugees fleeing state-funded terrorism – allegedly brought crime, unemployment, vagrancy, and drugs. Police departments across America responded with more black codes and aggressive policing of black communities.
Black life has always been criminalised and dehumanised in America.
During Barack Obama’s presidency, Michael Brown, Eric Garner and countless other unarmed African-Americans were killed by police, but with a black president many Americans felt progress was attainable.
Social media raised awareness of these injustices and helped create the Black Lives Matter movement.
Under President Donald Trump, we have the same type of violence that America has always had, but now we have, at best, an indifferent federal government, and at worst a racist president.
Due to this change, more white Americans are emboldened to re-employ black codes.
Under Obama, social media championed our desire for progress, and today it documents our obvious regression.
In New York City in May 2018, a black lawyer and her 19-year-old daughter were handcuffed and detained by police after being falsely accused of shoplifting.
During the same week, the police were called by a white student at Yale University because a black Yale student was sleeping in the common area in their dormitory.
In late April 2018, an African-American family had the police called on them by a white woman for having a cookout in a public park.
Following the arrest of two black men for sitting in a Starbucks, and the increased awareness of similar injustices, the world can more clearly see the racist applications of the law that black people constantly face in America.
Their arrest was black codes in 2018, but without the three months of forced labour.
Trump’s presidency has exacerbated the problem and social media has raised awareness, but employing black codes and masquerading oppression against black people as democratic justice and fair law enforcement has sadly always been America’s status quo.
